Week ending 30 May 2014

America and the death penalty

I’ve long been an opponent of the death penalty. I support its total abolition in the United States, preferably in the form of a constitutional amendment. So I’ve been gratified to see the U.S.’s use of capital punishment coming under increasing scrutiny in the light of recent botched executions.

In an article on 30 April, the day after Clayton Lockett died at Oklahoma State Penitentiary from a heart attack following a failed execution attempt, American freelance writer Jesse Berney wrote eloquently in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper of his shame that his country still carries out death sentences:

Lockett was the 20th person put to death in the United States in 2014. That’s 20 lives ended so far this year not by accident or illness or murder, but by our collective will, acting together to decide that we, as a society, have the right to declare that someone should die. It is a terrible stain on our humanity, and there are no studies, no reforms, no changes we can make to erase that stain. The death penalty cannot be improved or corrected. We can only stop killing people. And we must.

But the scrutiny isn’t just here at home. Steven Erlanger of The New York Timesnoted Europe’s disdain for this “particularly brutal American anachronism”:

The criticism spanned Europe’s ideological divide, outraging conservatives and liberals. Alice Arnold, a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, a right-leaning newspaper in Britain, wrote that “America is missing the point,” which is about “the very concept of killing in cold blood” and not about the method.

“I am proud to be British today, proud that I live in a country where this barbarism does not exist, but we must remember this atrocity occurred not in some far-off, third-world dictatorship,” Ms. Arnold wrote. “It happened in America, land of the free.”

Sprawl’s Achilles heel

Over at The Urbanophile, Aaron Renn explains what may finally get American cities to turn away from low-grade suburban sprawl: they can’t afford it.

“… the real reason sprawl, or suburban development as we’ve been practicing it, is a problem isn’t because it’s ugly, environmentally damaging, racist, or some other form of evil. The more fundamental problem is that it’s a long term financial loser. The numbers just don’t add up over the long term when you take a lifecycle view of it.”

Is college worth it?

I’ve written extensively on my own doubts about the value and quality of institutions of higher education in the United States. A friend pointed me to blog post at NYTimes.com that asked if college is worth it and came to the conclusion that, yes, it is.

The pay gap between college graduates and everyone else reached a record high last year, according to the new data, which is based on an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more an hour on average in 2013 than people without a degree. That’s up from 89 percent five years earlier, 85 percent a decade earlier and 64 percent in the early 1980s.

But what of the pressing feeling for many—especially many recent, highly educated college graduates with mountains of student debt working as baristas at Starbucks and sleeping on their parents’ couch—that college just isn’t worth it? “[P]ublic discussion today—for which we in the news media deserve some responsibility—often focuses on the undeniable fact that a bachelor’s degree does not guarantee success,” David Leonhardt notes. “But of course it doesn’t. Nothing guarantees success, especially after 15 years of disappointing economic growth and rising inequality.”

NPR got in on the action, too, asking if there are times when college really isn’t worth it. Anya Kamenetz concludes that there are three situations when higher ed doesn’t pay:

If you don’t graduate.

If you pick the wrong college.

If you pick the wrong degree.

Sounds like a lot of situations where something could go wrong, if you ask me. But, undoubtedly, I’ll be visiting this issue again soon.

Personal finance

Moisés Naím at The Atlanticwrote about a simple, three-question finance quiz administered to people in various countries around the globe. The results were published by two economists, Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia Mitchell, and they are startling. Only half of Germans and the Swiss, the highest scorers, got all three questions correct. Americans fared considerably worse: only 30% aced the quiz (fortunately, I am among them).

The problem? “Financial ignorance is widespread even as the world has changed in ways that make such ignorance more dangerous than ever before,” Mr. Naím writes, and he goes on to quote Ms. Lusardi and Ms. Mitchell on just why “dangerous” is a perfect descriptor:

Financial markets around the world have become increasingly accessible to the ‘small investor,’ as new products and financial services grow widespread. At the onset of the recent financial crisis, consumer credit and mortgage borrowing had burgeoned. People who had credit cards or subprime mortgages were in the historically unusual position of being able to decide how much they wanted to borrow. Alternative financial services including payday loans, pawn shops, auto title loans, tax refund loans, and rent-to-own shops have also become widespread. At the same time, changes in the pension landscape are increasingly thrusting responsibility for saving, investing, and decumulating wealth onto workers and retirees…. [Today], Baby Boomers mainly have defined contribution (DC) plans and Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) during their working years. This trend toward disintermediation is increasingly requiring people to decide how much to save and where to invest and, during retirement, to take on responsibility for careful decumulation so as not to outlive their assets while meeting their needs.